Thursday, 16 June 2011

King of the Internet

Whilst making my daily trip to warseer in search of Ogre rumours - which have dried up of late - I noticed this rather interesting thread.

According to the OP:

"It turns out that the reason GW has stopped leaking rumours, pictures, previews and whatnot is a response to the overall negative feedback to their leaks on the internet."

Quite where this information came from I can't say.

And needless to say the 'discussion' was of the normal slack-jawed, flat nosed variety - mostly off topic, plenty of meme based negativity, and lots of strawmen queueing up to express their wisdom in an effort to be king of the internet.

Now I don't know how true this rumour is, but I have to say it does make sense to me. Indeed I am surprised GW hasn't done it before.

Contrary to what the internut would have you believe, GW does take on board the feedback from forums, blogs, etc. In interviews I have heard, and read, the game designers state quite clearly that part of their job is to read the internet to find out what people are saying about the various projects they are working on.

Funnily enough the 'modernist marketeers' are condemning this move as a terrible decision and being 'modernists' decrying it as a backward move, and not part of the zetigeist of 'modern' marketing. Which says a great deal about the education system and very little about these people's understanding of business.

What people overlook is that the reason companies like PP, Mantic etc have to embrace the 'modern media' is because without it they would go bust. GW doesn't have to bother with this approach because they have invested in a chain of shops that does their advertising for them. And it is not like they don't use the internet, if you want to you can subscribe to their newsletter you can, they have a blog, a website, webstore etc - but hey! let's ignore all of that.

My favourite piece of pointless spouting lately was the claim that GW had put FLGS's in the UK out of business, which left me scratching my head. Since I can't recall there being such things. There were model shops, and toy shops, and the very occasional dedicated wargames shop (which generally didn't sell GW stuff), but if anything the growth of GW retail in the UK, has created a model that is now catching on. But then the moaning minny was American, so you can hardly expect them to be informed ;-)

But hey! this is the internut - and like football according to Sky Sports - nothing existed prior to the 1990's and the only reality is here and now.

I am also interested in the tittle tattle surrounding White Dwarf.

The meme is that it is not worth buying, that it isn't as good as it used to be, and it is just a glorified catalogue. GW have clearly taken this on board and appear to be moving to make it more central to the hobby with such things as the proposed Sisters of Battle codex release.

Have the internut experts reacted well to this.

Of course not. They have done what they always do. They have ignored the reality and while the meme has changed slightly, but they are still banging on and slagging the company off.

And let's face it no one with any sense wants to spend time with the type people playing king of the net in forums. And GW have obviously realised this, and switched from broadbrushed spamming - supposedly the only way to use the net (did you know it takes 12million emails to sell $100 of viagra) - to specifically targetting their audience, in order to try and flush the negativity from the 'community' they are trying to build going forward.